About a month ago, I asked our Computer People about putting Photoshop on my laptop.
I wanted to put Devil Horns on Nancy Pelosi pictures, Halos on John McCain, all the usual blogger stuff.
Plus, one of my motivations for doing this site was to force myself into staying somewhat computer literate in my march to senility.
One of my employees has a Computer Gaming website that gets around 2,000 hits a day. Anything he can do, I can do. Just slower. And later.
So when I asked the I.T. guys for Photoshop, they asked me for $400.
With a daughter about to enter A&M, I can't even think about paying $400 for a Photoshop licence.
I didn't think any more about Horns and Halos until I saw an internet blurb about an online service called Picnik. Picnik will let you crop, resize, recolor, spin, rotate, and vandalize your photos just like Photoshop. It's not very good with Hillary Horns and McCain Halos, but it was good enough for my purposes. And it was free. You can pay more for Picnik upgrades, but the things I need are free. Free.
A couple of weeks later, I'm on Terry White's Tech Blog, and he has a post about Photoshop Express. (Terry White's Tech Blog is one of the best sources for people trying to stay computer literate in their march to senility. He breaks everything down step by step.)
Photoshop Express, the training wheels version of Photoshop, is also free. Free. Here's the link.
Various online sources say that they still have a lot of kinks to work out of it - you can't do Horns and Halos yet - but it's getting there. Photoshop had to do something like this to compete with Picnik and other low cost, no cost software.
So where's the outrage, people? Why am I not reading furious editorials about what the unfettered Free Market is doing to the Photoshopping Industry? (Yeah, "to photoshop" is now a verb....)
Where are the calls for Photoshop subsidies that will help Photoshop defend itself from the predatory practices of Picnik? Shouldn't Picnik have had to pay a $400 tariff to bring the price of their service up to that of Photoshop?
We're in a race to the bottom. If this downward spiral continues, I'll be doing Horns and Halos within 6 months. Free. It will be horrible. If someone doesn't intervene, our Great American Photoshopping way of life will be....available to everybody.
Sigh..... The Free Market Economy is so destructive. The government should step in and regulate this.
4 comments:
if you had to come to me i would have arranged a nice payroll deduction plan so you could have photoshop. see me first next time.
your friendly employer
doug
Whew....I'm relieved.
For a moment I thought you were going to ask me to quote, engineer and develop a knockoff version in the prototype shop.
-TWS
If you haven't yet, check out Paint.net, an open source project that is comparable to Photoshop. Done originally by a group of MIT students, with funding from Microsoft.
I've only played with it a little and though it pains me to say, I prefer it to GIMP, the other big open source Photoshop competitor.
Doctor,
I'll get there one day. I'm discovering free toys faster than I can learn to use them.
And FORGET ABOUT keeping up with all the passwords.
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